Brain

During the last few years Indian women have dominated the world beauty contests. We have Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, among others. Of late Indian women writers have also come into prominence with winning awards like the Booker Prize. We have Arundhati Roy and now Kiran Desai winning the coveted Booker Prize for her book, The Inheritance of Loss. This goes to show that Indian women excel both in beauty and brain (not to forget also in strength, as winning laurels in many international sports...

GENEVA: When people with very high intelligence are given moderately difficult task, their brains work more efficiently compared to people with slightly above- average IQs, according to a new study. "When a more and a less intelligent person are given the same task, the more intelligent person requires less cortical activation to solve the task," said Elsbeth Stern, Professor for Research on Learning and Instruction at ETH Zurich in Switzerland . Scientists refer to this...

LONDON: An author has claimed that Google is damaging the brain of its users by providing information almost instantly, leading people to lose their intellectual capacity to store information. Nicolas Carr , The author of 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains', claimed that the web was depriving our mental faculties of the regular workouts they need. Carr, who is behind the 'Rough Type' blog, argued that to improve concentration sites such as Google...

The shadow on the wall startles the scribe. It vanishes the moment he puts on the light. It's only a shirt waving about on a wire, and not a stalker or a stealth bomber! For a heartstopping moment in that dimly-lit room though, he could have sworn otherwise. This reminds him of physicist Richard Feynman's wise words, "The easiest person to fool is yourself !" It helps, he added, to check out not only what is right about your pet theories and beliefs but what could be wrong with 'em!

NEW YORK: Absence of an hormone in the brain may trigger overeating behaviour in people who eat for pleasure rather than hunger, researchers report. In the lab experiments, researchers found that when the "glucagon like peptide-1" (GLP-1) hormone was reduced in the central nervous system of mice, they overate and consumed more high fat food. "The mice in which the peptide deficiency was induced ate beyond the need for calories and showed an increase preference for high fat food,"...

NEW YORK: Scanning teeth may reveal your lifetime exposure to toxins and metals linked to brain diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, say researchers, including one of Indian-origin. "Teeth are of particular interest to us for the measurement of chemical exposure in fetal and childhood development," said Manish Arora , associate professor in preventive medicine and dentistry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. "They provide a chronological...

NEW YORK: High school music training can improve the teenage brain's responses to sound and sharpen hearing and language skills, a study says. Music classes help enhance skills that are critical for academic success, the authors said. The results highlight music's place in the high school curriculum. "While music programmes are often the first to be cut when the school budget is tight, these results highlight music's place in the high school curriculum," said Nina Kraus , senior...

What effect do ads have on your brain? They surely influence you, neuroscientists say in a recent study, but not in ways that most ad-makers want. The great majority of the ads not only failed to rouse the key reward and mirror-neuron areas of the brain, but they often stimulated bad ones, say UCLA scientists, Marco Lacoboni and Joshua Freedman, who performed brain scans on people as they watched Super Bowl ads in America on February 5. Their research belongs to the brave new world of...

CHICAGO: Your brain may have decided what to buy even before you have sampled what is on offer, such is the power of brands. A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains. The findings were presented on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), which is the 92nd Scientific Assembly, a world's largest annual medical meeting where around...

LONDON: GlaxoSmithKline announced further clinical trial results on Sunday underlining the ability of a drug combination including its product Tykerb to fight breast cancer that has spread to the brain. An extension to an earlier Phase II study involving 49 patients showed 20% of those receiving a mix of Tykerb and Roche's Xeloda experienced at least a 50% volume reduction in measurable brain metastases. The finding is significant because up to a third of women with...

LONDON: What separates man from monkey? Oxford scientists have discovered an area of the brain linked to strategic decision-making that is unique to humans and appears to have no equivalent in other primates. The brain area pinpointed in the human frontal cortex is known to be intimately involved in some of the most advanced planning and decision-making processes that we think of as being especially human, researchers said. "We've identified an area of the brain that appears...

SYDNEY: Football Federation Australia chairman Frank Lowy has had brain surgery for a blood clot that is thought to have arisen from his fall from the podium during the trophy presentation ceremony at the A-League grand final in May. The 84-year-old billionaire got back to his feet and completed the presentation in Melbourne on May 17, but began feeling unwell while holidaying in Europe last week. Shopping mall operator Westfield Corporation...

NEW YORK: High school music training can improve the teenage brain's responses to sound and sharpen hearing and language skills, a study says. Music classes help enhance skills that are critical for academic success, the authors said. The results highlight music's place in the high school curriculum. "While music programmes are often the first to be cut when the school budget is tight, these results highlight music's place in the high school curriculum," said Nina Kraus , senior...

NEW YORK: Older adults can improve their brain function by raising their fitness level, a study shows. "Basically, the more exercise you did, the more benefit to the brain you saw," said Jeffrey Burns, professor of neurology at the University of Kansas Medical Center . The team led a six-month trial conducted with healthy adults ages 65 and older who showed no signs of cognitive decline. The results of the study were published in the journal PLOS ONE. The team focused on the...

LOS ANGELES: Neurons in a specific brain region play a key role in rapidly forming memories about every day events, a new study has found, paving the way for new methods to fight Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. The study examined neurons in the medial temporal lobe associated with episodic memory, the brain's ability to consciously recall experienced events and situations like running into an old school friend at the opera. Episodic memory logs these unique experiences and...

MUMBAI: Middle level executive exodus from foreign banks and institutions has accelerated with professionals increasingly opting to work with domestic firms, wooed by stock options as well as more elbowroom in decision-making. "I declined offers from two foreign banks with overseas relocation opportunities, but joined IIFL," said Himanshu Bhagat who recently joined India Infoline (IIFL) Wealth Management as a managing partner a few days ago....

WASHINGTON: Our brain uses subconscious mental categories to sort through everyday experiences, a new study has found. The brain knows it's time to cook when the stove is on, and the food and pots are out. When someone rushes away to calm a crying child, it knows cooking is over and it's time to be a parent. The brain processes and responds to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events. But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such experiences into...

CHICAGO: Stimulating the brain with rapid bursts of magnetic energy is a safe and effectively treatment for major depression, a new large-scale study has found. The finding offers a ray of hope to the 20 to 40 per cent of patients who do not respond to antidepressants and psychotherapy and to those who do not wish to treat their illness with drugs. "This study provides new support for the efficacy of TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) as a 'stand...

Modern cockpits in aircraft bombard pilots with so much information that their brains can shut down during a crisis, new research has warned. Researchers found that pilots' brains can become "overloaded" during highly stressful situations and as a result they fail to hear loud cockpit alarms that warn of an impending crash. Modern cockpits bombard pilots with so much information that the prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain where rational decision making...

LONDON: Neurons in a brain region called the medial temporal lobe play a key role in our ability to quickly form memories about real-life events and experiences, new research says. The findings could lead to development of new therapies to improve the lives of neurological patients with memory impairment, such as in Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury , or epilepsy. This is the first study to report in humans how individual brain cells help in the formation of episodic...